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's sound films, depicting an optimistically vast auditorium

A sound film is a film with synchronization, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but it would be decades before reliable synchronization was made commercially practical. The first commercial screening of movies with fully synchronized sound took place in New York City in April 1923. In the early years after the introduction of sound, films incorporating synchronized dialogue were known as "talking pictures," or "talkies." The first feature film movie originally presented as a talkie was The Jazz Singer (1927 film), released in October 1927.

By the early 1930s, the talkies were a global phenomenon. In the United States, they helped secure Cinema of the United States's position as one of the world's most powerful cultural/commercial systems. In Europe (and, to a lesser degree, elsewhere) the new development was treated with suspicion by many filmmakers and critics, who worried that a focus on dialogue would subvert the unique aesthetic virtues of soundless cinema. In Cinema of Japan, where the popular film tradition integrated silent movie and live vocal performance, talking pictures were slow to take root. In Cinema of India, sound was the transformative element that led to the rapid expansion of the nation's film industry—the most productive such industry in the world since the early 1960s.

History Early steps (1894 or 1895), produced by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson as a test of the early version of the Thomas Edison Kinetoscope#Kinetophone, combining the Kinetoscope and phonograph.The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as the concept of cinema itself. On February 27, 1888, a couple of days after photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge gave a lecture not far from the laboratory of Thomas Edison, the two inventors privately met. Muybridge later claimed that on this occasion, six years before the first commercial motion picture exhibition, he proposed a scheme for sound cinema that would combine his image-casting zoopraxiscope with Edison's recorded-sound technology.Robinson (1997), p. 23. No agreement was reached, but within a year Edison commissioned the development of the Kinetoscope, essentially a "peep-show" system, as a visual complement to his phonograph cylinder phonograph. The two devices were brought together as the kinetoscope#Kinetophone in 1895, but individual, cabinet viewing of motion pictures was soon to be outmoded by successes in film projection.Robertson (2001) claims that German inventor and filmmaker Oskar Messter began projecting sound motion pictures at 21 Unter den Linden in September 1896 (p. 168), but this seems to be an error. Koerber (1996) notes that after Messter acquired the Cinema Unter den Linden (located in the back room of a restaurant), it reopened under his management on September 21, 1896 (p. 53), but no source beside Robertson describes Messter as screening sound films before 1903. In 1899, a projected sound-film system known as Cinemacrophonograph or Phonorama, based primarily on the work of Swiss-born inventor François Dussaud, was exhibited in Paris; similar to the Kinetophone, the system required individual use of earphones.Altman (2005), p. 158; Cosandey (1996). An improved cylinder-based system, Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre, was developed by Clément-Maurice Gratioulet and Henri Lioret of France, allowing short films of theater, opera, and ballet excerpts to be presented at the Exposition Universelle (1900) in 1900. These appear to be the first publicly exhibited films with projection of both image and recorded sound.

Three major problems persisted, leading to motion pictures and sound recording largely taking separate paths for a generation:

  • Synchronization – The pictures and sound were recorded and played back by separate devices, which were difficult to start and maintain in synchronization.Sound engineer Mark Ulano, in "The Movies Are Born a Child of the Phonograph" (part 2 of his essay "Moving Pictures That Talk"), describes the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre version of synchronized sound cinema:
    • This system used an operator adjusted non-linkage form of primitive synchronization. The scenes to be shown were first filmed, and then the performers recorded their dialogue or songs on the Lioretograph (usually a Le Eclat concert cylinder format phonograph) trying to match tempo with the projected filmed performance. In showing the films, synchronization of sorts was achieved by adjusting the hand cranked film projector's speed to match the phonograph. the projectionist was equipped with a telephone through which he listened to the phonograph which was located in the orchestra pit.
  • Playback volume – While motion picture projectors soon allowed film to be shown to large theater audiences, audio technology before the development of electric amplification could not project to satisfactorily fill large spaces.
  • Recording fidelity – The primitive systems of the era produced sound of very low quality unless the performers were stationed directly in front of the cumbersome recording devices (acoustical horns, for the most part), imposing severe limits on the sort of films that could be created with live-recorded sound.
    • and giving the names of eighteen other "famous artists" shown in "living visions" at the Exposition Universelle (1900) using the Gratioulet-Lioret system.Cinematic innovators attempted to cope with the fundamental synchronization problem in a variety of ways; an increasing number of motion picture systems relied on gramophone records—known as sound-on-disc technology; the records themselves were often referred to as "Berliner discs", not because of any direct geographical connection, but after one of the primary inventors in the field, German-American Emile Berliner. Léon Gaumont had demonstrated a system involving mechanical synchronization between a film projector and turntable at the 1900 Paris Exposition. In 1902, his Chronophone, involving an electrical connection Gaumont had recently patented, was demonstrated to the French Photographic Society. Four years later, he introduced the Elgéphone, a compressed-air amplification system based on the Auxetophone, developed by British inventors Horace Short and Charles Parsons.If there was a drawback to the Elgéphone, it was apparently not a lack of volume. Dan Gilmore describes its predecessor technology in his 2004 essay "What's Louder than Loud? The Auxetophone": "Was the Auxetophone loud? It was painfully loud." For a more detailed report of Auxetophone-induced discomfort, see The Auxetophone and Other Compressed-Air Gramophones. Despitehigh expectations, Gaumont's sound innovations had only limited commercial success—though improvements, they still did not satisfactorily address the three basic issues with sound film and were expensive as well. For some years, American inventor E. E. Norton's Cameraphone was the primary competitor to the Gaumont system (sources differ on whether the Cameraphone was disc- or cylinder-based); it ultimately failed for many of the same reasons that held back the Chronophone. By the end of 1910, the groundswell in sound motion pictures had subsided.Altman (2005), p. 158–165.

    Innovations continued on other fronts, as well. In 1907, French-born, London-based Eugene Augustin Lauste—who had worked at Edison's lab between 1886 and 1892—was awarded the first patent for sound-on-film technology, involving the transformation of sound into light waves that are photographically recorded direct onto celluloid. As described by historian Scott Eyman,t was a double system, that is, the sound was on a different piece of film from the picture.... In essence, the sound was captured by a microphone and translated into light waves via a light valve, a thin ribbon of sensitive metal over a tiny slit. The sound reaching this ribbon would be converted into light by the shivering of the diaphragm, focusing the resulting light waves through the slit, where it would be photographed on the side of the film, on a strip about a tenth of an inch wide.Eyman (1997), pp. 30–31.Though sound-on-film would eventually become the universal standard for synchronized sound cinema, Lauste never successfully exploited his innovations, which came to an effective dead end. In 1913, Edison introduced a new cylinder-based synch-sound apparatus known, just like his 1895 system, as the Kinetophone; instead of films being shown to individual viewers in the kinetoscope cabinet, they were now projected onto a screen. The phonograph was connected by an intricate arrangement of pulleys to the film projector, allowing—under ideal conditions—for synchronization. Conditions, however, were rarely ideal, and the new, improved Kinetophone was retired after little more than a year.Gomery (1985), pp. 54–55. In 1914, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt was granted German patent 309,536 for his sound-on-film work; that same year, he apparently demonstrated a film made with the process to an audience of scientists in Berlin. Erik Magnus Cambell Tigerstedt entry in Föreningen Svenskt Filmljud; A Country That Innovates essay by Kari Sipilä, part of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland's Virtual Finland website. See also A. M. Pertti Kuusela, E.M.C Tigerstedt "Suomen Edison" (Insinööritieto Oy: 1981).

    Other sound films, based on a variety of systems, were made before the 1920s, mostly of performers lip-synching to previously made audio recordings. The technology was far from adequate to big-league commercial purposes, and for many years the heads of the major film studio#The majors before the Golden Age saw little benefit in producing sound motion pictures. Thus such films were relegated, along with color film (motion picture), to the status of novelty.

    Crucial innovations A number of technological developments contributed to making sound cinema commercially viable by the late 1920s. Two involved contrasting approaches to synchronized sound reproduction, or playback: talkie.Advanced sound-on-film – In 1919, American inventor Lee De Forest was awarded several patents that would lead to the first sound-on-film technology with commercial application. In De Forest's system, the sound track was photographically recorded on to the side of the strip of motion picture film to create a composite, or "married," print. If proper synchronization of sound and picture was achieved in recording, it could be absolutely counted on in playback. Over the next four years, he improved his system with the help of equipment and patents licensed from another American inventor in the field, Theodore Case.Sponable (1947), part 2.

    At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Polish-born research engineer Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner was working independently on a similar process. On June 9, 1922, he gave the first reported U.S. demonstration of a sound-on-film motion picture to members of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.Crafton (1997), pp. 51–52; Moone (2004); Łotysz (2006). Note that Crafton and Łotysz describe the demonstration as taking place at an AIEE conference. Moone, writing for the journal of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, says the audience was "members of the Urbana chapter of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers." As with Lauste and Tigerstedt, Tykociner's system would never be taken advantage of commercially; De Forest's, however, soon would.

    On April 15, 1923, at New York City's Rivoli Theater, came the first commercial screening of motion pictures with sound-on-film, the future standard: a set of shorts under the banner of Phonofilm, accompanying a silent feature.The information on the April 1923 Phonofilms screening contained in the main text is per the majority of available sources. A minority of sources claim, variously, that (a) the date was April 1, (b) the venue was the Rialto Theater, and/or (c) the feature, Bella Donna, had sound. The best piece of evidence in support of the majority description is the contemporary New York Times review of Bella Donna, which appeared on April 16 and which makes no reference to the film having any recorded sound at all. That June, De Forest entered into an extended legal battle with an employee, Freeman Harrison Owens, for title to one of the crucial Phonofilm patents. Although De Forest ultimately won the case in the courts, Owens is today recognized as a central innovator in the field. The following year, De Forest's studio released the first commercial dramatic film shot as a talking picture—the two-reeler Love's Old Sweet Song, directed by J. Searle Dawley and featuring Una Merkel.A few sources indicate that the film was released in 1923, but the two most recent authoritative histories that discuss the film—Crafton (1997), p. 66; Hijiya (1992), p. 103—both give 1924. It is generally accepted that De Forest recorded a synchronized musical score for director Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924) when it arrived in the United States the year after its German debut—which would make it the first feature film with synchronized sound throughout—but seemingly no two sources agree on when the recording took place or if the film was ever actually presented with synch-sound. The August 24, 1925, New York Times review of Siegfried, following its apparent American premiere at New York City's Century Theater the night before, describes a live orchestra performing the score. The De Forest recording was likely made then. Phonofilms' stock in trade, however, was not original dramas but celebrity documentaries, popular music acts, and comedy performances. President Calvin Coolidge, opera singer Abbie Mitchell, and vaudeville stars such as Phil Baker, Ben Bernie, Eddie Cantor, and Oscar Levant appeared in the firm's pictures. Hollywood remained suspicious, even fearful, of the new technology. As Photoplay editor James Quirk put it in March 1924, "Talking pictures are perfected, says Dr. Lee De Forest. So is castor oil."Quoted in Lasky (1989), p. 20. De Forest's process continued to be used through 1927 in the United States for dozens of short Phonofilms; in the UK it was employed a few years longer for both shorts and features by British Sound Film Productions, a subsidiary of British Talking Pictures, which purchased the primary Phonofilm assets. By the end of 1930, the Phonofilm business would be liquidated.Low (1997a), p. 203; Low (1997b), p. 183.

    In Europe, others were also working on the development of sound-on-film. In 1919, the same year that DeForest received his first patents in the field, three German inventors patented the Tri-Ergon sound system. On September 17, 1922, the Tri-Ergon group gave a public screening of sound-on-film productions—including a dramatic talkie, Der Brandstifter (The Arsonist)—before an invited audience at the Alhambra Kino in Berlin. By the end of the decade, Tri-Ergon would be the dominant European sound system. In 1923, two Danish engineers, Axel Petersen and Arnold Poulsen, patented a system in which sound was recorded on a separate filmstrip running parallel with the image reel. Gaumont would license and briefly put the technology to commercial use under the name Cinéphone.Crisp (1997), pp. 97–98; Crafton (1997), pp. 419–420.

    It was domestic competition, however, that would lead to Phonofilms' eclipse. By September 1925, De Forest and Case's working arrangement had fallen through. The following July, Case joined with Fox Film, Hollywood's third largest studio system, to found the Fox-Case Corporation. The system developed by Case and his assistant, Earl Sponable, given the name Movietone sound system, thus became the first viable sound-on-film technology controlled by a Hollywood movie studio. The following year, Fox purchased the North American rights to the Tri-Ergon system, though the company found it inferior to Movietone and virtually impossible to integrate the two different systems to advantage.Sponable (1947), part 4. In 1927, as well, Fox retained the services of Freeman Owens, who had particular expertise in constructing cameras for synch-sound film.See Freeman Harrison Owens (1890–1979) entry in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture. A number of sources erroneously state that Owens's and/or the Tri-Ergon patents were essential to the creation of the Fox-Case Movietone system.

    Advanced sound-on-disc – Parallel with improvements in sound-on-film technology, a number of companies were making progress with systems in which movie sound was recorded onto phonograph discs. In sound-on-disc technology from the era, a phonograph turntable is connected by a mechanical interlock to a specially modified movie projector, allowing for synchronization. In 1921, the Photokinema sound-on-disc system developed by Orlando Kellum was employed to add synchronized sound sequences to D. W. Griffith's failed silent film Dream Street. A love song, performed by star Ralph Graves, was recorded, as was a sequence of live vocal effects. Apparently, dialogue scenes were also recorded, but the results were unsatisfactory and the film was never publicly screened incorporating them. On May 1, 1921, Dream Street was rereleased, with love song added, at New York City's Town Hall theater, qualifying it—however haphazardly—as the first feature-length film with a live-recorded vocal sequence.Bradley (1996), p. 4; Gomery (2005), p. 29. Crafton (1997) misleadingly implies that Griffith's film had not previously been exhibited commercially before its sound-enhanced premiere. He also misidentifies Ralph Graves as Richard Grace (p. 58). There would be no others for more than six years.' Don Juan (1926 film) (1926), the first major motion picture to premiere with a full-length synchronized soundtrack. Audio recording engineer George Groves, the first in Hollywood to hold the job, would supervise sound on Woodstock (film), 44 years later.In 1925, Warner Bros., then a small Hollywood studio with big ambitions, began experimenting with sound-on-disc systems at New York's Vitagraph Studios, which it had recently purchased. The Warner Bros. technology, named Vitaphone, was publicly introduced on August 6, 1926, with the premiere of the nearly three-hour-long Don Juan (1926 film); the first feature-length movie to employ a synchronized sound system of any type throughout, its soundtrack contained a musical film score and sound effects, but no recorded dialogue—in other words, it had been staged and shot as a silent film. Accompanying Don Juan, however, were eight shorts of musical performances, mostly classical, as well as a four-minute filmed introduction by Will H. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, all with live-recorded sound. These were the first true sound films exhibited by a Hollywood studio. performing on the ukelele in the Vitaphone sound short His Pastimes (1926). The eight musical shorts were Caro Nome, An Evening on the Don, La Fiesta, His Pastimes, The Kreutzer Sonata, Mischa Elman, Overture "Tannhäuser", and Vesti La Giubba. Don Juan would not go into general release until February of the following year, making the technically similar The Better 'Ole, put out by Warner Bros. in October 1926, the first feature film with synchronized playback throughout to show to a broad audience.

    Sound-on-film would ultimately win out over sound-on-disc because of a number of fundamental technical advantages:

    Nonetheless, in the early years, sound-on-disc had the edge over sound-on-film in two substantial ways:

    As sound-on-film technology improved, both of these disadvantages were overcome.

    The third crucial set of innovations marked a major step forward in both the live recording of sound and its effective playback: engineer E. B. Craft, at left, demonstrating the Vitaphone projection system. A Vitaphone disc had a running time of about 11 minutes, enough to match that of a 1,000-foot reel of 35mm film.Fidelity electronic recording and amplification – Beginning in 1922, the research branch of AT&T's Western Electric manufacturing division began working intensively on recording technology for both sound-on-disc and sound-on film. In 1925, the company publicly introduced a greatly improved system of electronic audio, including sensitive Microphone#Conductor or condenser microphones and rubber-line recorders. That May, the company licensed entrepreneur Walter J. Rich to exploit the system for commercial motion pictures; he founded Vitagraph, which Warner Bros. acquired a half interest in just one month later. In April 1926, Warners signed a contract with AT&T for exclusive use of its film sound technology for the redubbed Vitaphone operation, leading to the production of Don Juan and its accompanying shorts over the following months. During the period when Vitaphone had exclusive access to the patents, the fidelity of recordings made for Warners films was markedly superior to those made for the company's sound-on-film competitors. Meanwhile, Bell Labs—the new name for the AT&T research operation—was working at a furious pace on sophisticated sound amplification technology that would allow recordings to be played back over loudspeakers at theater-filling volume. The new moving-coil speaker system was installed in New York's Warners Theatre at the end of July and its patent submission, for what Western Electric called the No. 555 Receiver, was filed on August 4, just two days before the premiere of Don Juan. Motion Picture Sound 1910–1929 and Sound Recording Research at Bell Labs detailed chronologies; part of Steven E. Schoenherr's Recording Technology History resource.

    Late in the year, AT&T/Western Electric created a licensing division, Electrical Research Products Inc. (ERPI), to handle rights to the company's film-related audio technology. Vitaphone still had legal exclusivity, but having lapsed in its royalty payments, effective control of the rights was in ERPI's hands. On December 31, 1926, Warners granted Fox-Case a sublicense for the use of the Western Electric system in exchange for a share of revenues that would go directly to ERPI.Gomery (2005), pp. 42, 50. See also Motion Picture Sound 1910–1929, perhaps the best online source for details on these developments, though here it fails to note that Fox's original deal for the Western Electric technology involved a sublicensing arrangement. The patents of all three concerns were cross-licensed. Superior recording and amplification technology was now available to two Hollywood studios, pursuing two very different methods of sound reproduction. The new year would finally see the emergence of sound cinema as a significant commercial medium.

    Triumph of the "talkies" In February 1927, an agreement was signed by five leading Hollywood movie companies: the so-called Big Two—Paramount Pictures and MGM—a pair of studios in the next rank—Universal Studios and the fading First National—and Cecil B. DeMille's small but prestigious Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC). The five studios agreed to collectively select just one provider for sound conversion. The alliance then sat back and waited to see what sort of results the forerunners came up with. In May, Warner Bros. sold back its exclusivity rights to ERPI (along with the Fox-Case sublicense) and signed a new royalty contract similar to Fox's for use of Western Electric technology. As Fox and Warners pressed forward with sound cinema in different directions, both technologically and commercially—Fox with newsreels and then scored dramas, Warners with talking features—so did ERPI, which sought to corner the market by signing up the five allied studios., on Vitaphone, and a Fox newsreel, on Movietone sound system, together on the same bill.The big sound film sensations of the year all took advantage of pre-existing celebrity. On May 20, 1927, at New York's Roxy Theater, Fox Movietone presented a sound film of the takeoff of Charles Lindbergh's celebrated flight to Paris, recorded earlier that day. In June, a Fox sound newsreel depicting his return welcomes in New York and Washington, D.C., was shown. These were the two most acclaimed sound motion pictures to date.Gomery (2005), p. 51. In May, as well, Fox had released the first Hollywood fiction film with synchronized dialogue: the short They're Coming to Get Me, starring comedian Chic Sale.Lasky (1989), pp. 21–22. After rereleasing a few silent feature hits, such as Seventh Heaven (film), with recorded music, Fox came out with its first original Movietone feature on September 23: Sunrise (film), by acclaimed German director F. W. Murnau. As with Don Juan, the film's soundtrack was comprised of a musical score and sound effects (including, in a couple of crowd scenes, "wild", nonspecific vocals). Then, on October 6, 1927, Warner Bros.' The Jazz Singer (1927 film) premiered. It was a smash box office success for the mid-level studio, earning a total of $2.625 million in the U.S. and abroad, almost a million dollars more than the previous record for a Warners film.Glancy (1995), p. 4 . The previous highest-grossing Warner Bros. film was Don Juan, which Glancy notes earned $1.693 million, foreign and domestic. Historian Douglas Crafton (1997) seeks to downplay the "total domestic gross income" of The Jazz Singer, $1.97 million (p. 528), but that figure alone would have constituted a record for the studio. Crafton's claim that The Jazz Singer "was in a distinct second or third tier of attractions compared to the most popular films of the day and even other Vitaphone talkies" (p. 529) offers a skewed perspective. While the movie was no match for the half-dozen biggest hits of the decade, the available evidence suggests that it was one of the three highest-earning films released in 1927 and that overall its performance was comparable to the other two, The King of Kings and Wings (film). It is undisputed that its total earnings were more than double those of the next four Vitaphone talkies; the first three of which, according to Glancy's analysis of in-house Warner Bros. figures, "earned just under $1,000,000 each", and the fourth, Lights of New York, a quarter-million more. Produced with the Vitaphone system, most of the film does not contain live-recorded audio, relying, like Sunrise and Don Juan, on a score and effects. When the movie's star, Al Jolson, sings, however, the film shifts to sound recorded on the set, including both his musical performances and two scenes with ad-libbed speech—one of Jolson's character, Jakie Rabinowitz (Jack Robin), addressing a cabaret audience; the other an exchange between him and his mother. Though the success of The Jazz Singer was due largely to Jolson, already established as one of America's biggest music stars, and its limited use of synchronized sound hardly qualified it as an innovative sound film (let alone the "first"), the movie's handsome profits were proof enough to the industry that the technology was worth investing in.

    The development of commercial sound cinema had proceeded in fits and starts before The Jazz Singer, and the film's success did not change things overnight. Not till May 1928 did the group of four big studios (PDC had dropped out of the alliance), along with United Artists and others, sign with ERPI for conversion of production facilities and theaters for sound film. Initially, all ERPI-wired theaters were made Vitaphone-compatible; most were equipped to project Movietone reels as well.Crafton (1997), p. 148. Even with access to both technologies, however, most of the Hollywood companies remained slow to produce talking features of their own. No studio beside Warner Bros. released even a part-talking feature until the low-budget-oriented Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) premiered The Perfect Crime on June 17, 1928, eight months after The Jazz Singer.Crafton (1997), p. 140. FBO had come under the effective control of a Western Electric competitor, General Electric's RCA division, which was looking to market its new sound-on-film system, RCA Photophone. Unlike Fox-Case's Movietone and De Forest's Phonofilm, which were variable-density systems, Photophone was a variable-area system—a refinement in the way the audio signal was inscribed on film that would ultimately become the rule. (In both sorts of system, a specially designed lamp, whose Exposure (photography) to the film is determined by the audio input, is used to record sound photographically as a series of minuscule lines. In a variable-density process, the lines are of varying darkness; in a variable-area process, the lines are of varying width.) By October, the FBO-RCA alliance would lead to the creation of Hollywood's newest major studio, RKO Pictures. and Milton Sills in The Barker, First National's inaugural talkie. The film was released in December 1928, two months after Warner Bros. acquired a controlling interest in the studio.Meanwhile, Warner Bros. had released three more talkies in the spring, all profitable, if not at the level of the The Jazz Singer: In March, The Tenderloin appeared; it was billed by Warners as the first feature in which characters spoke their parts, though only 15 of its 88 minutes had dialogue. Glorious Betsy followed in April, and The Lion and the Mouse (31 minutes of dialogue) in May.Hirschhorn (1979), pp. 59, 60. On July 6, 1928, the first all-talking feature, Lights of New York, premiered. The film cost Warner Bros. only $23,000 to produce, but grossed $1.252 million, a record rate of return surpassing 5,000%. In September, the studio released another Al Jolson part-talking picture, The Singing Fool, which more than doubled The Jazz Singer's earnings record for a Warners movie.Glancy (1995), pp. 4–5. Schatz (1998) says the production cost of Lights of New York totaled $75,000 (p. 64). Even if this number is accurate, the rate of return was still over 1,600%. This second Jolson screen smash demonstrated the movie musical's ability to turn a song into a national hit: by the following summer, the Jolson number "Sonny Boy" had racked up 2 million record and 1.25 million sheet music sales.Robertson (2001), p. 180. September 1928 also saw the release of Paul Terry (cartoonist)'s Dinner Time, among the first animated cartoons produced with synchronized sound. After seeing it, Walt Disney decided to make one of his Mickey Mouse short subject, Steamboat Willie, with sound as well.

    Over the course of 1928, as Warner Bros. began to rake in huge profits due to the popularity of its sound films, the other studios quickened the pace of their conversion to the new technology. Paramount, the industry leader, put out its first talkie in late September, Beggars of Life; though it had just a few lines of dialogue, it demonstrated the studio's recognition of the new medium's power. Interference, Paramount's first all-talker, debuted in November. The process known as "goat glanding" briefly became widespread: soundtracks, sometimes including a smatter of post-dubbed dialogue or song, were added to movies that had been shot, and in some cases released, as silents.Crafton (1997) describes the term's derivation: "The skeptical press disparigingly referred to these films as 'goat glands'...from outrageous cures for impotency practiced in the 1920s, including restorative elixers, tonics, and surgical procedures. It implied that producers were trying to put some new life into their old films" (pp. 168–169). A few minutes of singing could qualify such a newly endowed film as a "musical." (Griffith's Dream Street had essentially been a "goat gland.") Expectations swiftly changed, and the sound "fad" of 1927 became standard procedure by 1929. In February 1929, sixteen months after The Jazz Singer's debut, Columbia Pictures became the last of the eight studios that would be known as "Major film studio#The majors during the Golden Age" during Hollywood's Golden Age to release its first part-talking feature, Lone Wolf's Daughter.The first official releases from RKO (which produced only all-talking pictures) appeared still later in the year, but after the October 1928 merger that created it, the company put out a number of talkies produced by its FBO constituent. Most American movie theaters, especially outside of urban areas, were still not equipped for sound and the studios were not entirely convinced of the talkies' universal appeal—through mid-1930, the majority of Hollywood movies were produced in dual versions, silent as well as talking.Crafton (1997), pp. 169–171, 253–254. Though few in the industry predicted it, silent film as a viable commercial medium in the United States would soon be little more than a memory. The final mainstream purely silent feature put out by a major Hollywood studio was the Hoot Gibson Western (genre) Points West, released by Universal Pictures in August 1929.In 1931, two Hollywood studios would release special projects without spoken dialogue (now customarily classified as "silents"): Charles Chaplin's City Lights (United Artists) and F. W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty's Tabu (film) (Paramount). The last totally silent feature produced in the United States for general distribution was The Poor Millionaire, released by Biltmore Pictures in April 1930. Four other silent features, all low-budget Westerns, were also released in 1930 (Robertson , p. 173). One month earlier, the first all-color, all-talking feature had gone into general release: Warner Bros.' On with the Show

    The transition: Europe , instead of kissing their hands, had been invited to sing.The Jazz Singer had its European sound premiere at the Piccadilly Theatre in London on September 27, 1928.As Thomas J. Saunders (1994) reports, it premiered the same month in Berlin, but as a silent. "Not until June 1929 did Berlin experience the sensation of sound as New York had in 1927—a premiere boasting dialogue and song": The Singing Fool (p. 224). In Paris, The Jazz Singer had its sound premiere in January 1929 (Crisp , p. 101). According to film historian Rachael Low, "Many in the industry realized at once that a change to sound production was inevitable."Low (1997a), p. 191. On January 16, 1929, the first European feature film with a synchronized vocal performance and recorded score premiered: the German production Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame (I Kiss Your Hand, Madame). How the Pictures Learned to Talk: The Emergence of German Sound Film historical survey; part of the filmportal.de website. A dialogueless film that contains only a few minutes of singing by star Richard Tauber, it may be thought of as the Old World's combination Dream Street and Don Juan. The movie was made with the sound-on-film system controlled by the German-Dutch firm Tobis, corporate heirs to the Tri-Ergon concern. With an eye toward commanding the emerging European market for sound film, Tobis entered into a compact with its chief competitor, Klangfilm, a subsidiary of Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft (AEG). Early in 1929, the two businesses began comarketing their recording and playback technologies. As ERPI began to wire theaters around Europe, Tobis-Klangfilm claimed that the Western Electric system infringed on the Tri-Ergon patents, stalling the introduction of American technology in many places. Just as RCA had entered the movie business to maximize the value of its recording system, Tobis also established its own production houses, led by Germany's Tobis Filmkunst. (1929), Anny Ondra, was an industry favorite, but her thick accent became an issue when the film was reshot with sound. Without post-dubbing (filmmaking) capacity, her dialogue was simultaneously uttered and recorded offscreen by actress Joan Barry. Ondra's British film career was over.Over the course of 1929, most of the major European filmmaking countries began joining Hollywood in the changeover to sound. Many of the trend-setting European talkies were shot abroad as production companies leased studios while their own were being converted or as they deliberately targeted markets speaking different languages. One of Europe's first two feature-length dramatic talkies was created in still a different sort of twist on multinational moviemaking: The Crimson Circle was a coproduction between director Friedrich Zelnik's Efzet-Film company and British Sound Film Productions (BSFP). In 1928, the film had been released as the silent Der Rote Kreis in Germany, where it was shot; English dialogue was apparently dubbed in much later using the De Forest Phonofilm process controlled by BSFP's corporate parent. It was given a British trade screening in March 1929, as was a part-talking film made entirely in the UK: The Clue of the New Pin, a British Lion production using the sound-on-disc British Photophone system. In May, Black Waters, a British and Dominions Film Corporation promoted as the first UK all-talker, received its initial trade screening; it had been shot completely in Hollywood with a Western Electric sound-on-film system. None of these pictures made much impact.Low (1997a), pp. 178, 203–205; Low (1997b), p. 183; Der Rote Kreis Deutsches Filminstitut entry; Crafton (1997), pp. 432. Note also that IMDb.com incorrectly refers to Der Rote Kreis/The Crimson Circle as a British International Pictures (BIP) coproduction (it also spells Zelnik's first name "Frederic"). The authentic BIP production Kitty is sometimes included among the candidates for "first British talkie." In fact, the film was produced and premiered as a silent for its original 1928 release. The stars later came to New York to record dialogue, with which the film was rereleased in June 1929, after much better credentialed candidates. See sources cited above. The first successful European dramatic talkie was the all-British Blackmail (1929 film). Directed by twenty-nine-year-old Alfred Hitchcock, the movie had its London debut June 21, 1929. Originally shot as a silent, Blackmail was restaged to include dialogue sequences, along with a score and sound effects, before its premiere. A British International Pictures (BIP) production, it was recorded on RCA Photophone, General Electric having bought a share of AEG in order to gain access to the Tobis-Klangfilm markets. Blackmail was a substantial hit; critical response was also positive—notorious curmudgeon Hugh Castle, for example, called it "perhaps the most intelligent mixture of sound and silence we have yet seen."Quoted in Spoto (1984), p. 136.

    On August 23, the modest-sized Austrian film industry came out with a talkie: G’schichten aus der Steiermark (Stories from Styria), an Eagle Film–Ottoton Film production.Wagenleitner (1994), p. 253; Robertson (2001), p. 10. On September 30, the first entirely German-made feature-length dramatic talkie, Das Land ohne Frauen (Land Without Women), premiered. A Tobis Filmkunst production, about one-quarter of the movie contained dialogue, which was strictly segregated from the special effects and music. The response was underwhelming.Jelavich (2006), pp. 215–216; Crafton (1997), p. 595, n. 59. Sweden's first talkie, Konstgjorda Svensson (Artificial Svensson), premiered on October 14. Eight days later, Aubert Franco-Film came out with Le Collier de la reine (The Queen's Necklace), shot at the Épinay-sur-Seine studio near Paris. Conceived as a silent film, it was given a Tobis-recorded score and a single talking sequence—the first dialogue scene in a French feature. On October 31, Les Trois masques debuted; a Pathé-Natan film, it is generally regarded as the initial French feature talkie, though it was shot, like Blackmail, at the Elstree Studios, just outside of London. The production company had contracted with RCA Photophone and Britain then had the nearest facility with the system. The Braunberger-Richebé talkie La Route est belle, also shot at Elstree, followed a few weeks later.Crisp (1997), p. 103; Epinay ville du cinéma part of the Epinay-sur-Seine municipal website; Le Collier de la reine All Movie Guide description by Hal Erickson; Le cinéma français en 1930 chronology also covering 1929; part of the Cine-studies website. In his 2002 book Genre, Myth, and Convention in the French Cinema, 1929–1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), Crisp says that Le Collier de la reine was "'merely' sonorized, not dialogued" (p. 381), but all other available detailed descriptions (including his own from 1997) mention a dialogue sequence. Note also that Crisp gives October 31 as the debut date of Les Trois masques and Cine-studies gives its release ("sortie") date as November 2. Note finally, where Crisp defines in Genre, Myth, and Convention a "feature" as being a minimum of sixty minutes long, this article follows the equally common, and Wikipedia-prevalent, standard of forty minutes or longer. Before the Paris studios were fully sound-equipped—a process that stretched well into 1930—a number of other early French talkies were shot in Germany.Crisp (1997), p. 103. The first all-talking German feature, Atlantik, had premiered in Berlin on October 28. Yet another Elstree-made movie, it was rather less German at heart than Les Trois masques and La Route est belle were French; a BIP production with a British scenarist and German director, it was also shot in English as Atlantic.Chapman (2003), p. 82; Chronomedia: 1929 chronology of media developments during the year—part of the Terra Media website. The entirely German Aafa-Film production Dich hab ich geliebt (Because I Loved You) opened three-and-a-half weeks later. It was not "Germany's First Talking Film", as the marketing had it, but it was the first to be released in the United States.See the January 25, 1930, New York Times review for a description. put it, "in the unforgettable images of this spare and pure story we can discern the effort of an entire nation."Carné (1932), p. 105.In 1930, the first Polish talkies premiered, using sound-on-disc systems: Moralność pani Dulskiej (The Morality of Mrs. Dulska) in March and the all-talking Niebezpieczny romans (Dangerous Love Affair) in October.Haltof (2002), p. 24. In Italy, whose once vibrant film industry had become moribund by the late 1920s, the first talkie, La Canzone dell'amore (The Song of Love), also came out in October; within two years, Italian cinema would be enjoying a revival.See Nichols and Bazzoni (1995), p. 98, for a description of La Canzone dell'amore and its premiere. The first movie spoken in Czech debuted in 1930 as well, Tonka Sibenice (Gallows Toni).According to Il Cinema Ritrovato, the program for XXI Mostra Internazionale del Cinema Libero (Bologna; November 22–29, 1992), the film was shot in Paris. According to the IMDb entry on the film, it was a Czech-German coproduction. The two claims are not necessarily contradictory. Several European nations with minor positions in the field also produced their first talking pictures—Belgium (in French), Denmark, Greece, and Romania.. See Robertson (2001), pp. 10–14. Robertson claims Switzerland produced its first talkie in 1930, but it has not been possible to independently confirm this. The first talkies from Finland, Hungary, Norway, Portugal, and Turkey appeared in 1931, the first talkies from Ireland (English-language) and Spain and the first in Slovak in 1932, the first Dutch talkie in 1933, and the first Bulgarian talkie in 1934. In the Americas, the first Canadian talkie came out in 1929—North of '49 was a remake of the previous year's silent His Destiny. The first Brazilian talkie, Acabaram-se os otários (The End of the Simpletons), also appeared in 1929. That year, as well, the first Yiddish talkies were produced in New York: East Side Sadie (originally a silent), followed by Ad Mosay (The Eternal Prayer) (Crafton , p. 414). Sources differ on whether Más fuerte que el deber, the first Mexican (and Spanish-language) talkie, came out in 1930 or 1931. The first Argentine talkie appeared in 1931 and the first Chilean talkie in 1934. Robertson asserts that the first Cuban feature talkie was a 1930 production called El Caballero de Max; every other published source surveyed cites La Serpiente roja (1937). Nineteen-thirty-one saw the first talkie produced on the African continent: South Africa's Mocdetjie, in Afrikaans. Egypt's Arabic Onchoudet el Fouad (1932) and Morocco's French-language Itto (1934) followed. The Soviet Union's robust film industry came out with its first sound features in 1931: Dziga Vertov's nonfiction Entuziazm, with an experimental, dialogueless soundtrack, was released in the spring.Several sources name Zemlya zhazhdet (The Earth Is Thirsty), directed by Yuli Raizman, as the first Soviet sound feature. Originally produced and premiered as a silent in 1930, it was rereleased with a non-talking, music-and-effects soundtrack the following year. In the fall, the Nikolai Ekk drama Putyovka v zhizn (The Road to Life), premiered as the state's first talking picture.

    Throughout much of Europe, conversion of exhibition venues lagged well behind production capacity, requiring talkies to be produced in parallel silent versions or simply shown without sound in many places. While the pace of conversion was relatively swift in Britain—with over 60 percent of theaters equipped for sound by the end of 1930, similar to the U.S. figure—in France, by contrast, more than half of theaters nationwide were still projecting in silence by late 1932.Crisp (1997), p. 101; Crafton (1997), p. 155. According to scholar Colin G. Crisp, "Anxiety about resuscitating the flow of silent films was frequently expressed in the industrial press, and a large section of the industry still saw the silent as a viable artistic and commercial prospect till about 1935."Crisp (1997), p. 101–102. The situation was particularly acute in the Soviet Union; as of spring 1933, fewer than one out of every hundred film projectors in the country was as yet equipped for sound.Kenez (2001), p. 123.

    The transition: Asia 's Madamu to nyobo (The Neighbor's Wife and Mine; 1931), a production of the Shochiku studio, was the first major commercial and critical success of Japanese sound cinema.During the 1920s and 1930s, Japan was one of the world's two largest producers of motion pictures, along with the United States. Though the country's film industry was among the first to produce both sound and talking features, the full changeover to sound proceeded much more slowly than in the West. It appears that the first Japanese sound film, Reimai (Dawn), was made in 1926 with the De Forest Phonofilm system.Burch (1979), pp. 145–146. Note that Burch misdates Madamu to nyobo as 1932. He also incorrectly claims that Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse made no sound films before 1936. In fact, Ozu's Hakoiri musume (An Innocent Maid, aka The Young Virgin) and Naruse's Tsuma yo bara no yo ni (Wife! Be Like a Rose!), both acclaimed talking features, were produced and released in 1935. Using the sound-on-disc Minatoki system, the leading Nikkatsu studio produced a pair of talkies in 1929: Taii no musume (The Captain's Daughter) and Furusato (Hometown), the latter directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. The rival Shochiku studio began the successful production of sound-on-film talkies in 1931 using a variable-density process called Tsuchibashi.Anderson and Richie (1982), p. 77. Two years later, however, more than 80 percent of movies made in the country were still silents. Two of the country's leading directors, Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse, did not make their first sound films until 1935. As late as 1938, over a third of all movies produced in Japan were shot without dialogue.Freiberg (1987), p. 76.

    The enduring popularity of the silent medium in Japanese cinema owed in great part to the tradition of the benshi, a live narrator who performed as accompaniment to a film screening. As director Akira Kurosawa later described, the benshi "not only recounted the plot of the films, they enhanced the emotional content by performing the voices and sound effects and providing evocative descriptions of events and images on the screen.... The most popular narrators were stars in their own right, solely responsible for the patronage of a particular theatre."Quoted in Freiberg (1987), p. 76. Film historian Mariann Lewinsky argues,The end of silent film in the West and in Japan was imposed by the industry and the market, not by any inner need or natural evolution.... Silent cinema was a highly pleasurable and fully mature form. It didn't lack anything, least in Japan, where there was always the human voice doing the dialogues and the commentary. Sound films were not better, just more economical. As a cinema owner you didn't have to pay the wages of musicians and benshi any more. And a good benshi was a star demanding star payment. A Page of Madness (1927) interview with Mariann Lewinsky by Jasper Sharp, March 7, 2002; part of the Midnight Eye website.By the same token, the viability of the benshi system facilitated a gradual transition to sound—allowing the studios to spread out the capital costs of conversion and their directors and technical crews time to become familiar with the new technology.See Freiburg (2000), "The Film Industry." premiered March 14, 1931, in Bombay. The first Indian talkie was so popular that "police aid had to be summoned to control the crowds."Quoted in Chatterji (1999), "The History of Sound." It was shot with the Tanar single-system camera, which recorded sound directly onto the film.The Mandarin-language 's sound films, depicting an optimistically vast auditorium

    A sound film is a film with synchronization, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but it would be decades before reliable synchronization was made commercially practical. The first commercial screening of movies with fully synchronized sound took place in New York City in April 1923. In the early years after the introduction of sound, films incorporating synchronized dialogue were known as "talking pictures," or "talkies." The first feature film movie originally presented as a talkie was The Jazz Singer (1927 film), released in October 1927.

    By the early 1930s, the talkies were a global phenomenon. In the United States, they helped secure Cinema of the United States's position as one of the world's most powerful cultural/commercial systems. In Europe (and, to a lesser degree, elsewhere) the new development was treated with suspicion by many filmmakers and critics, who worried that a focus on dialogue would subvert the unique aesthetic virtues of soundless cinema. In Cinema of Japan, where the popular film tradition integrated silent movie and live vocal performance, talking pictures were slow to take root. In Cinema of India, sound was the transformative element that led to the rapid expansion of the nation's film industry—the most productive such industry in the world since the early 1960s.

    History Early steps (1894 or 1895), produced by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson as a test of the early version of the Thomas Edison Kinetoscope#Kinetophone, combining the Kinetoscope and phonograph.The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as the concept of cinema itself. On February 27, 1888, a couple of days after photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge gave a lecture not far from the laboratory of Thomas Edison, the two inventors privately met. Muybridge later claimed that on this occasion, six years before the first commercial motion picture exhibition, he proposed a scheme for sound cinema that would combine his image-casting zoopraxiscope with Edison's recorded-sound technology.Robinson (1997), p. 23. No agreement was reached, but within a year Edison commissioned the development of the Kinetoscope, essentially a "peep-show" system, as a visual complement to his phonograph cylinder phonograph. The two devices were brought together as the kinetoscope#Kinetophone in 1895, but individual, cabinet viewing of motion pictures was soon to be outmoded by successes in film projection.Robertson (2001) claims that German inventor and filmmaker Oskar Messter began projecting sound motion pictures at 21 Unter den Linden in September 1896 (p. 168), but this seems to be an error. Koerber (1996) notes that after Messter acquired the Cinema Unter den Linden (located in the back room of a restaurant), it reopened under his management on September 21, 1896 (p. 53), but no source beside Robertson describes Messter as screening sound films before 1903. In 1899, a projected sound-film system known as Cinemacrophonograph or Phonorama, based primarily on the work of Swiss-born inventor François Dussaud, was exhibited in Paris; similar to the Kinetophone, the system required individual use of earphones.Altman (2005), p. 158; Cosandey (1996). An improved cylinder-based system, Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre, was developed by Clément-Maurice Gratioulet and Henri Lioret of France, allowing short films of theater, opera, and ballet excerpts to be presented at the Exposition Universelle (1900) in 1900. These appear to be the first publicly exhibited films with projection of both image and recorded sound.

    Three major problems persisted, leading to motion pictures and sound recording largely taking separate paths for a generation:

  • Synchronization – The pictures and sound were recorded and played back by separate devices, which were difficult to start and maintain in synchronization.Sound engineer Mark Ulano, in "The Movies Are Born a Child of the Phonograph" (part 2 of his essay "Moving Pictures That Talk"), describes the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre version of synchronized sound cinema:
    • This system used an operator adjusted non-linkage form of primitive synchronization. The scenes to be shown were first filmed, and then the performers recorded their dialogue or songs on the Lioretograph (usually a Le Eclat concert cylinder format phonograph) trying to match tempo with the projected filmed performance. In showing the films, synchronization of sorts was achieved by adjusting the hand cranked film projector's speed to match the phonograph. the projectionist was equipped with a telephone through which he listened to the phonograph which was located in the orchestra pit.
  • Playback volume – While motion picture projectors soon allowed film to be shown to large theater audiences, audio technology before the development of electric amplification could not project to satisfactorily fill large spaces.
  • Recording fidelity – The primitive systems of the era produced sound of very low quality unless the performers were stationed directly in front of the cumbersome recording devices (acoustical horns, for the most part), imposing severe limits on the sort of films that could be created with live-recorded sound.
    • and giving the names of eighteen other "famous artists" shown in "living visions" at the Exposition Universelle (1900) using the Gratioulet-Lioret system.Cinematic innovators attempted to cope with the fundamental synchronization problem in a variety of ways; an increasing number of motion picture systems relied on gramophone records—known as sound-on-disc technology; the records themselves were often referred to as "Berliner discs", not because of any direct geographical connection, but after one of the primary inventors in the field, German-American Emile Berliner. Léon Gaumont had demonstrated a system involving mechanical synchronization between a film projector and turntable at the 1900 Paris Exposition. In 1902, his Chronophone, involving an electrical connection Gaumont had recently patented, was demonstrated to the French Photographic Society. Four years later, he introduced the Elgéphone, a compressed-air amplification system based on the Auxetophone, developed by British inventors Horace Short and Charles Parsons.If there was a drawback to the Elgéphone, it was apparently not a lack of volume. Dan Gilmore describes its predecessor technology in his 2004 essay "What's Louder than Loud? The Auxetophone": "Was the Auxetophone loud? It was painfully loud." For a more detailed report of Auxetophone-induced discomfort, see The Auxetophone and Other Compressed-Air Gramophones. Despitehigh expectations, Gaumont's sound innovations had only limited commercial success—though improvements, they still did not satisfactorily address the three basic issues with sound film and were expensive as well. For some years, American inventor E. E. Norton's Cameraphone was the primary competitor to the Gaumont system (sources differ on whether the Cameraphone was disc- or cylinder-based); it ultimately failed for many of the same reasons that held back the Chronophone. By the end of 1910, the groundswell in sound motion pictures had subsided.Altman (2005), p. 158–165.

    Innovations continued on other fronts, as well. In 1907, French-born, London-based Eugene Augustin Lauste—who had worked at Edison's lab between 1886 and 1892—was awarded the first patent for sound-on-film technology, involving the transformation of sound into light waves that are photographically recorded direct onto celluloid. As described by historian Scott Eyman,t was a double system, that is, the sound was on a different piece of film from the picture.... In essence, the sound was captured by a microphone and translated into light waves via a light valve, a thin ribbon of sensitive metal over a tiny slit. The sound reaching this ribbon would be converted into light by the shivering of the diaphragm, focusing the resulting light waves through the slit, where it would be photographed on the side of the film, on a strip about a tenth of an inch wide.Eyman (1997), pp. 30–31.Though sound-on-film would eventually become the universal standard for synchronized sound cinema, Lauste never successfully exploited his innovations, which came to an effective dead end. In 1913, Edison introduced a new cylinder-based synch-sound apparatus known, just like his 1895 system, as the Kinetophone; instead of films being shown to individual viewers in the kinetoscope cabinet, they were now projected onto a screen. The phonograph was connected by an intricate arrangement of pulleys to the film projector, allowing—under ideal conditions—for synchronization. Conditions, however, were rarely ideal, and the new, improved Kinetophone was retired after little more than a year.Gomery (1985), pp. 54–55. In 1914, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt was granted German patent 309,536 for his sound-on-film work; that same year, he apparently demonstrated a film made with the process to an audience of scientists in Berlin. Erik Magnus Cambell Tigerstedt entry in Föreningen Svenskt Filmljud; A Country That Innovates essay by Kari Sipilä, part of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland's Virtual Finland website. See also A. M. Pertti Kuusela, E.M.C Tigerstedt "Suomen Edison" (Insinööritieto Oy: 1981).

    Other sound films, based on a variety of systems, were made before the 1920s, mostly of performers lip-synching to previously made audio recordings. The technology was far from adequate to big-league commercial purposes, and for many years the heads of the major film studio#The majors before the Golden Age saw little benefit in producing sound motion pictures. Thus such films were relegated, along with color film (motion picture), to the status of novelty.

    Crucial innovations A number of technological developments contributed to making sound cinema commercially viable by the late 1920s. Two involved contrasting approaches to synchronized sound reproduction, or playback: talkie.Advanced sound-on-film – In 1919, American inventor Lee De Forest was awarded several patents that would lead to the first sound-on-film technology with commercial application. In De Forest's system, the sound track was photographically recorded on to the side of the strip of motion picture film to create a composite, or "married," print. If proper synchronization of sound and picture was achieved in recording, it could be absolutely counted on in playback. Over the next four years, he improved his system with the help of equipment and patents licensed from another American inventor in the field, Theodore Case.Sponable (1947), part 2.

    At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Polish-born research engineer Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner was working independently on a similar process. On June 9, 1922, he gave the first reported U.S. demonstration of a sound-on-film motion picture to members of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.Crafton (1997), pp. 51–52; Moone (2004); Łotysz (2006). Note that Crafton and Łotysz describe the demonstration as taking place at an AIEE conference. Moone, writing for the journal of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, says the audience was "members of the Urbana chapter of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers." As with Lauste and Tigerstedt, Tykociner's system would never be taken advantage of commercially; De Forest's, however, soon would.

    On April 15, 1923, at New York City's Rivoli Theater, came the first commercial screening of motion pictures with sound-on-film, the future standard: a set of shorts under the banner of Phonofilm, accompanying a silent feature.The information on the April 1923 Phonofilms screening contained in the main text is per the majority of available sources. A minority of sources claim, variously, that (a) the date was April 1, (b) the venue was the Rialto Theater, and/or (c) the feature, Bella Donna, had sound. The best piece of evidence in support of the majority description is the contemporary New York Times review of Bella Donna, which appeared on April 16 and which makes no reference to the film having any recorded sound at all. That June, De Forest entered into an extended legal battle with an employee, Freeman Harrison Owens, for title to one of the crucial Phonofilm patents. Although De Forest ultimately won the case in the courts, Owens is today recognized as a central innovator in the field. The following year, De Forest's studio released the first commercial dramatic film shot as a talking picture—the two-reeler Love's Old Sweet Song, directed by J. Searle Dawley and featuring Una Merkel.A few sources indicate that the film was released in 1923, but the two most recent authoritative histories that discuss the film—Crafton (1997), p. 66; Hijiya (1992), p. 103—both give 1924. It is generally accepted that De Forest recorded a synchronized musical score for director Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924) when it arrived in the United States the year after its German debut—which would make it the first feature film with synchronized sound throughout—but seemingly no two sources agree on when the recording took place or if the film was ever actually presented with synch-sound. The August 24, 1925, New York Times review of Siegfried, following its apparent American premiere at New York City's Century Theater the night before, describes a live orchestra performing the score. The De Forest recording was likely made then. Phonofilms' stock in trade, however, was not original dramas but celebrity documentaries, popular music acts, and comedy performances. President Calvin Coolidge, opera singer Abbie Mitchell, and vaudeville stars such as Phil Baker, Ben Bernie, Eddie Cantor, and Oscar Levant appeared in the firm's pictures. Hollywood remained suspicious, even fearful, of the new technology. As Photoplay editor James Quirk put it in March 1924, "Talking pictures are perfected, says Dr. Lee De Forest. So is castor oil."Quoted in Lasky (1989), p. 20. De Forest's process continued to be used through 1927 in the United States for dozens of short Phonofilms; in the UK it was employed a few years longer for both shorts and features by British Sound Film Productions, a subsidiary of British Talking Pictures, which purchased the primary Phonofilm assets. By the end of 1930, the Phonofilm business would be liquidated.Low (1997a), p. 203; Low (1997b), p. 183.

    In Europe, others were also working on the development of sound-on-film. In 1919, the same year that DeForest received his first patents in the field, three German inventors patented the Tri-Ergon sound system. On September 17, 1922, the Tri-Ergon group gave a public screening of sound-on-film productions—including a dramatic talkie, Der Brandstifter (The Arsonist)—before an invited audience at the Alhambra Kino in Berlin. By the end of the decade, Tri-Ergon would be the dominant European sound system. In 1923, two Danish engineers, Axel Petersen and Arnold Poulsen, patented a system in which sound was recorded on a separate filmstrip running parallel with the image reel. Gaumont would license and briefly put the technology to commercial use under the name Cinéphone.Crisp (1997), pp. 97–98; Crafton (1997), pp. 419–420.

    It was domestic competition, however, that would lead to Phonofilms' eclipse. By September 1925, De Forest and Case's working arrangement had fallen through. The following July, Case joined with Fox Film, Hollywood's third largest studio system, to found the Fox-Case Corporation. The system developed by Case and his assistant, Earl Sponable, given the name Movietone sound system, thus became the first viable sound-on-film technology controlled by a Hollywood movie studio. The following year, Fox purchased the North American rights to the Tri-Ergon system, though the company found it inferior to Movietone and virtually impossible to integrate the two different systems to advantage.Sponable (1947), part 4. In 1927, as well, Fox retained the services of Freeman Owens, who had particular expertise in constructing cameras for synch-sound film.See Freeman Harrison Owens (1890–1979) entry in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture. A number of sources erroneously state that Owens's and/or the Tri-Ergon patents were essential to the creation of the Fox-Case Movietone system.

    Advanced sound-on-disc – Parallel with improvements in sound-on-film technology, a number of companies were making progress with systems in which movie sound was recorded onto phonograph discs. In sound-on-disc technology from the era, a phonograph turntable is connected by a mechanical interlock to a specially modified movie projector, allowing for synchronization. In 1921, the Photokinema sound-on-disc system developed by Orlando Kellum was employed to add synchronized sound sequences to D. W. Griffith's failed silent film Dream Street. A love song, performed by star Ralph Graves, was recorded, as was a sequence of live vocal effects. Apparently, dialogue scenes were also recorded, but the results were unsatisfactory and the film was never publicly screened incorporating them. On May 1, 1921, Dream Street was rereleased, with love song added, at New York City's Town Hall theater, qualifying it—however haphazardly—as the first feature-length film with a live-recorded vocal sequence.Bradley (1996), p. 4; Gomery (2005), p. 29. Crafton (1997) misleadingly implies that Griffith's film had not previously been exhibited commercially before its sound-enhanced premiere. He also misidentifies Ralph Graves as Richard Grace (p. 58). There would be no others for more than six years.' Don Juan (1926 film) (1926), the first major motion picture to premiere with a full-length synchronized soundtrack. Audio recording engineer George Groves, the first in Hollywood to hold the job, would supervise sound on Woodstock (film), 44 years later.In 1925, Warner Bros., then a small Hollywood studio with big ambitions, began experimenting with sound-on-disc systems at New York's Vitagraph Studios, which it had recently purchased. The Warner Bros. technology, named Vitaphone, was publicly introduced on August 6, 1926, with the premiere of the nearly three-hour-long Don Juan (1926 film); the first feature-length movie to employ a synchronized sound system of any type throughout, its soundtrack contained a musical film score and sound effects, but no recorded dialogue—in other words, it had been staged and shot as a silent film. Accompanying Don Juan, however, were eight shorts of musical performances, mostly classical, as well as a four-minute filmed introduction by Will H. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, all with live-recorded sound. These were the first true sound films exhibited by a Hollywood studio. performing on the ukelele in the Vitaphone sound short His Pastimes (1926). The eight musical shorts were Caro Nome, An Evening on the Don, La Fiesta, His Pastimes, The Kreutzer Sonata, Mischa Elman, Overture "Tannhäuser", and Vesti La Giubba. Don Juan would not go into general release until February of the following year, making the technically similar The Better 'Ole, put out by Warner Bros. in October 1926, the first feature film with synchronized playback throughout to show to a broad audience.

    Sound-on-film would ultimately win out over sound-on-disc because of a number of fundamental technical advantages:

    Nonetheless, in the early years, sound-on-disc had the edge over sound-on-film in two substantial ways:

    As sound-on-film technology improved, both of these disadvantages were overcome.

    The third crucial set of innovations marked a major step forward in both the live recording of sound and its effective playback: engineer E. B. Craft, at left, demonstrating the Vitaphone projection system. A Vitaphone disc had a running time of about 11 minutes, enough to match that of a 1,000-foot reel of 35mm film.Fidelity electronic recording and amplification – Beginning in 1922, the research branch of AT&T's Western Electric manufacturing division began working intensively on recording technology for both sound-on-disc and sound-on film. In 1925, the company publicly introduced a greatly improved system of electronic audio, including sensitive Microphone#Conductor or condenser microphones and rubber-line recorders. That May, the company licensed entrepreneur Walter J. Rich to exploit the system for commercial motion pictures; he founded Vitagraph, which Warner Bros. acquired a half interest in just one month later. In April 1926, Warners signed a contract with AT&T for exclusive use of its film sound technology for the redubbed Vitaphone operation, leading to the production of Don Juan and its accompanying shorts over the following months. During the period when Vitaphone had exclusive access to the patents, the fidelity of recordings made for Warners films was markedly superior to those made for the company's sound-on-film competitors. Meanwhile, Bell Labs—the new name for the AT&T research operation—was working at a furious pace on sophisticated sound amplification technology that would allow recordings to be played back over loudspeakers at theater-filling volume. The new moving-coil speaker system was installed in New York's Warners Theatre at the end of July and its patent submission, for what Western Electric called the No. 555 Receiver, was filed on August 4, just two days before the premiere of Don Juan. Motion Picture Sound 1910–1929 and Sound Recording Research at Bell Labs detailed chronologies; part of Steven E. Schoenherr's Recording Technology History resource.

    Late in the year, AT&T/Western Electric created a licensing division, Electrical Research Products Inc. (ERPI), to handle rights to the company's film-related audio technology. Vitaphone still had legal exclusivity, but having lapsed in its royalty payments, effective control of the rights was in ERPI's hands. On December 31, 1926, Warners granted Fox-Case a sublicense for the use of the Western Electric system in exchange for a share of revenues that would go directly to ERPI.Gomery (2005), pp. 42, 50. See also Motion Picture Sound 1910–1929, perhaps the best online source for details on these developments, though here it fails to note that Fox's original deal for the Western Electric technology involved a sublicensing arrangement. The patents of all three concerns were cross-licensed. Superior recording and amplification technology was now available to two Hollywood studios, pursuing two very different methods of sound reproduction. The new year would finally see the emergence of sound cinema as a significant commercial medium.

    Triumph of the "talkies" In February 1927, an agreement was signed by five leading Hollywood movie companies: the so-called Big Two—Paramount Pictures and MGM—a pair of studios in the next rank—Universal Studios and the fading First National—and Cecil B. DeMille's small but prestigious Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC). The five studios agreed to collectively select just one provider for sound conversion. The alliance then sat back and waited to see what sort of results the forerunners came up with. In May, Warner Bros. sold back its exclusivity rights to ERPI (along with the Fox-Case sublicense) and signed a new royalty contract similar to Fox's for use of Western Electric technology. As Fox and Warners pressed forward with sound cinema in different directions, both technologically and commercially—Fox with newsreels and then scored dramas, Warners with talking features—so did ERPI, which sought to corner the market by signing up the five allied studios., on Vitaphone, and a Fox newsreel, on Movietone sound system, together on the same bill.The big sound film sensations of the year all took advantage of pre-existing celebrity. On May 20, 1927, at New York's Roxy Theater, Fox Movietone presented a sound film of the takeoff of Charles Lindbergh's celebrated flight to Paris, recorded earlier that day. In June, a Fox sound newsreel depicting his return welcomes in New York and Washington, D.C., was shown. These were the two most acclaimed sound motion pictures to date.Gomery (2005), p. 51. In May, as well, Fox had released the first Hollywood fiction film with synchronized dialogue: the short They're Coming to Get Me, starring comedian Chic Sale.Lasky (1989), pp. 21–22. After rereleasing a few silent feature hits, such as Seventh Heaven (film), with recorded music, Fox came out with its first original Movietone feature on September 23: Sunrise (film), by acclaimed German director F. W. Murnau. As with Don Juan, the film's soundtrack was comprised of a musical score and sound effects (including, in a couple of crowd scenes, "wild", nonspecific vocals). Then, on October 6, 1927, Warner Bros.' The Jazz Singer (1927 film) premiered. It was a smash box office success for the mid-level studio, earning a total of $2.625 million in the U.S. and abroad, almost a million dollars more than the previous record for a Warners film.Glancy (1995), p. 4 . The previous highest-grossing Warner Bros. film was Don Juan, which Glancy notes earned $1.693 million, foreign and domestic. Historian Douglas Crafton (1997) seeks to downplay the "total domestic gross income" of The Jazz Singer, $1.97 million (p. 528), but that figure alone would have constituted a record for the studio. Crafton's claim that The Jazz Singer "was in a distinct second or third tier of attractions compared to the most popular films of the day and even other Vitaphone talkies" (p. 529) offers a skewed perspective. While the movie was no match for the half-dozen biggest hits of the decade, the available evidence suggests that it was one of the three highest-earning films released in 1927 and that overall its performance was comparable to the other two, The King of Kings and Wings (film). It is undisputed that its total earnings were more than double those of the next four Vitaphone talkies; the first three of which, according to Glancy's analysis of in-house Warner Bros. figures, "earned just under $1,000,000 each", and the fourth, Lights of New York, a quarter-million more. Produced with the Vitaphone system, most of the film does not contain live-recorded audio, relying, like Sunrise and Don Juan, on a score and effects. When the movie's star, Al Jolson, sings, however, the film shifts to sound recorded on the set, including both his musical performances and two scenes with ad-libbed speech—one of Jolson's character, Jakie Rabinowitz (Jack Robin), addressing a cabaret audience; the other an exchange between him and his mother. Though the success of The Jazz Singer was due largely to Jolson, already established as one of America's biggest music stars, and its limited use of synchronized sound hardly qualified it as an innovative sound film (let alone the "first"), the movie's handsome profits were proof enough to the industry that the technology was worth investing in.

    The development of commercial sound cinema had proceeded in fits and starts before The Jazz Singer, and the film's success did not change things overnight. Not till May 1928 did the group of four big studios (PDC had dropped out of the alliance), along with United Artists and others, sign with ERPI for conversion of production facilities and theaters for sound film. Initially, all ERPI-wired theaters were made Vitaphone-compatible; most were equipped to project Movietone reels as well.Crafton (1997), p. 148. Even with access to both technologies, however, most of the Hollywood companies remained slow to produce talking features of their own. No studio beside Warner Bros. released even a part-talking feature until the low-budget-oriented Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) premiered The Perfect Crime on June 17, 1928, eight months after The Jazz Singer.Crafton (1997), p. 140. FBO had come under the effective control of a Western Electric competitor, General Electric's RCA division, which was looking to market its new sound-on-film system, RCA Photophone. Unlike Fox-Case's Movietone and De Forest's Phonofilm, which were variable-density systems, Photophone was a variable-area system—a refinement in the way the audio signal was inscribed on film that would ultimately become the rule. (In both sorts of system, a specially designed lamp, whose Exposure (photography) to the film is determined by the audio input, is used to record sound photographically as a series of minuscule lines. In a variable-density process, the lines are of varying darkness; in a variable-area process, the lines are of varying width.) By October, the FBO-RCA alliance would lead to the creation of Hollywood's newest major studio, RKO Pictures. and Milton Sills in The Barker, First National's inaugural talkie. The film was released in December 1928, two months after Warner Bros. acquired a controlling interest in the studio.Meanwhile, Warner Bros. had released three more talkies in the spring, all profitable, if not at the level of the The Jazz Singer: In March, The Tenderloin appeared; it was billed by Warners as the first feature in which characters spoke their parts, though only 15 of its 88 minutes had dialogue. Glorious Betsy followed in April, and The Lion and the Mouse (31 minutes of dialogue) in May.Hirschhorn (1979), pp. 59, 60. On July 6, 1928, the first all-talking feature, Lights of New York, premiered. The film cost Warner Bros. only $23,000 to produce, but grossed $1.252 million, a record rate of return surpassing 5,000%. In September, the studio released another Al Jolson part-talking picture, The Singing Fool, which more than doubled The Jazz Singer's earnings record for a Warners movie.Glancy (1995), pp. 4–5. Schatz (1998) says the production cost of Lights of New York totaled $75,000 (p. 64). Even if this number is accurate, the rate of return was still over 1,600%. This second Jolson screen smash demonstrated the movie musical's ability to turn a song into a national hit: by the following summer, the Jolson number "Sonny Boy" had racked up 2 million record and 1.25 million sheet music sales.Robertson (2001), p. 180. September 1928 also saw the release of Paul Terry (cartoonist)'s Dinner Time, among the first animated cartoons produced with synchronized sound. After seeing it, Walt Disney decided to make one of his Mickey Mouse short subject, Steamboat Willie, with sound as well.

    Over the course of 1928, as Warner Bros. began to rake in huge profits due to the popularity of its sound films, the other studios quickened the pace of their conversion to the new technology. Paramount, the industry leader, put out its first talkie in late September, Beggars of Life; though it had just a few lines of dialogue, it demonstrated the studio's recognition of the new medium's power. Interference, Paramount's first all-talker, debuted in November. The process known as "goat glanding" briefly became widespread: soundtracks, sometimes including a smatter of post-dubbed dialogue or song, were added to movies that had been shot, and in some cases released, as silents.Crafton (1997) describes the term's derivation: "The skeptical press disparigingly referred to these films as 'goat glands'...from outrageous cures for impotency practiced in the 1920s, including restorative elixers, tonics, and surgical procedures. It implied that producers were trying to put some new life into their old films" (pp. 168–169). A few minutes of singing could qualify such a newly endowed film as a "musical." (Griffith's Dream Street had essentially been a "goat gland.") Expectations swiftly changed, and the sound "fad" of 1927 became standard procedure by 1929. In February 1929, sixteen months after The Jazz Singer's debut, Columbia Pictures became the last of the eight studios that would be known as "Major film studio#The majors during the Golden Age" during Hollywood's Golden Age to release its first part-talking feature, Lone Wolf's Daughter.The first official releases from RKO (which produced only all-talking pictures) appeared still later in the year, but after the October 1928 merger that created it, the company put out a number of talkies produced by its FBO constituent. Most American movie theaters, especially outside of urban areas, were still not equipped for sound and the studios were not entirely convinced of the talkies' universal appeal—through mid-1930, the majority of Hollywood movies were produced in dual versions, silent as well as talking.Crafton (1997), pp. 169–171, 253–254. Though few in the industry predicted it, silent film as a viable commercial medium in the United States would soon be little more than a memory. The final mainstream purely silent feature put out by a major Hollywood studio was the Hoot Gibson Western (genre) Points West, released by Universal Pictures in August 1929.In 1931, two Hollywood studios would release special projects without spoken dialogue (now customarily classified as "silents"): Charles Chaplin's City Lights (United Artists) and F. W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty's Tabu (film) (Paramount). The last totally silent feature produced in the United States for general distribution was The Poor Millionaire, released by Biltmore Pictures in April 1930. Four other silent features, all low-budget Westerns, were also released in 1930 (Robertson , p. 173). One month earlier, the first all-color, all-talking feature had gone into general release: Warner Bros.' On with the Show

    The transition: Europe , instead of kissing their hands, had been invited to sing.The Jazz Singer had its European sound premiere at the Piccadilly Theatre in London on September 27, 1928.As Thomas J. Saunders (1994) reports, it premiered the same month in Berlin, but as a silent. "Not until June 1929 did Berlin experience the sensation of sound as New York had in 1927—a premiere boasting dialogue and song": The Singing Fool (p. 224). In Paris, The Jazz Singer had its sound premiere in January 1929 (Crisp , p. 101). According to film historian Rachael Low, "Many in the industry realized at once that a change to sound production was inevitable."Low (1997a), p. 191. On January 16, 1929, the first European feature film with a synchronized vocal performance and recorded score premiered: the German production Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame (I Kiss Your Hand, Madame). How the Pictures Learned to Talk: The Emergence of German Sound Film historical survey; part of the filmportal.de website. A dialogueless film that contains only a few minutes of singing by star Richard Tauber, it may be thought of as the Old World's combination Dream Street and Don Juan. The movie was made with the sound-on-film system controlled by the German-Dutch firm Tobis, corporate heirs to the Tri-Ergon concern. With an eye toward commanding the emerging European market for sound film, Tobis entered into a compact with its chief competitor, Klangfilm, a subsidiary of Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft (AEG). Early in 1929, the two businesses began comarketing their recording and playback technologies. As ERPI began to wire theaters around Europe, Tobis-Klangfilm claimed that the Western Electric system infringed on the Tri-Ergon patents, stalling the introduction of American technology in many places. Just as RCA had entered the movie business to maximize the value of its recording system, Tobis also established its own production houses, led by Germany's Tobis Filmkunst. (1929), Anny Ondra, was an industry favorite, but her thick accent became an issue when the film was reshot with sound. Without post-dubbing (filmmaking) capacity, her dialogue was simultaneously uttered and recorded offscreen by actress Joan Barry. Ondra's British film career was over.Over the course of 1929, most of the major European filmmaking countries began joining Hollywood in the changeover to sound. Many of the trend-setting European talkies were shot abroad as production companies leased studios while their own were being converted or as they deliberately targeted markets speaking different languages. One of Europe's first two feature-length dramatic talkies was created in still a different sort of twist on multinational moviemaking: The Crimson Circle was a coproduction between director Friedrich Zelnik's Efzet-Film company and British Sound Film Productions (BSFP). In 1928, the film had been released as the silent Der Rote Kreis in Germany, where it was shot; English dialogue was apparently dubbed in much later using the De Forest Phonofilm process controlled by BSFP's corporate parent. It was given a British trade screening in March 1929, as was a part-talking film made entirely in the UK: The Clue of the New Pin, a British Lion production using the sound-on-disc British Photophone system. In May, Black Waters, a British and Dominions Film Corporation promoted as the first UK all-talker, received its initial trade screening; it had been shot completely in Hollywood with a Western Electric sound-on-film system. None of these pictures made much impact.Low (1997a), pp. 178, 203–205; Low (1997b), p. 183; Der Rote Kreis Deutsches Filminstitut entry; Crafton (1997), pp. 432. Note also that IMDb.com incorrectly refers to Der Rote Kreis/The Crimson Circle as a British International Pictures (BIP) coproduction (it also spells Zelnik's first name "Frederic"). The authentic BIP production Kitty is sometimes included among the candidates for "first British talkie." In fact, the film was produced and premiered as a silent for its original 1928 release. The stars later came to New York to record dialogue, with which the film was rereleased in June 1929, after much better credentialed candidates. See sources cited above. The first successful European dramatic talkie was the all-British Blackmail (1929 film). Directed by twenty-nine-year-old Alfred Hitchcock, the movie had its London debut June 21, 1929. Originally shot as a silent, Blackmail was restaged to include dialogue sequences, along with a score and sound effects, before its premiere. A British International Pictures (BIP) production, it was recorded on RCA Photophone, General Electric having bought a share of AEG in order to gain access to the Tobis-Klangfilm markets. Blackmail was a substantial hit; critical response was also positive—notorious curmudgeon Hugh Castle, for example, called it "perhaps the most intelligent mixture of sound and silence we have yet seen."Quoted in Spoto (1984), p. 136.

    On August 23, the modest-sized Austrian film industry came out with a talkie: G’schichten aus der Steiermark (Stories from Styria), an Eagle Film–Ottoton Film production.Wagenleitner (1994), p. 253; Robertson (2001), p. 10. On September 30, the first entirely German-made feature-length dramatic talkie, Das Land ohne Frauen (Land Without Women), premiered. A Tobis Filmkunst production, about one-quarter of the movie contained dialogue, which was strictly segregated from the special effects and music. The response was underwhelming.Jelavich (2006), pp. 215–216; Crafton (1997), p. 595, n. 59. Sweden's first talkie, Konstgjorda Svensson (Artificial Svensson), premiered on October 14. Eight days later, Aubert Franco-Film came out with Le Collier de la reine (The Queen's Necklace), shot at the Épinay-sur-Seine studio near Paris. Conceived as a silent film, it was given a Tobis-recorded score and a single talking sequence—the first dialogue scene in a French feature. On October 31, Les Trois masques debuted; a Pathé-Natan film, it is generally regarded as the initial French feature talkie, though it was shot, like Blackmail, at the Elstree Studios, just outside of London. The production company had contracted with RCA Photophone and Britain then had the nearest facility with the system. The Braunberger-Richebé talkie La Route est belle, also shot at Elstree, followed a few weeks later.Crisp (1997), p. 103; Epinay ville du cinéma part of the Epinay-sur-Seine municipal website; Le Collier de la reine All Movie Guide description by Hal Erickson; Le cinéma français en 1930 chronology also covering 1929; part of the Cine-studies website. In his 2002 book Genre, Myth, and Convention in the French Cinema, 1929–1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), Crisp says that Le Collier de la reine was "'merely' sonorized, not dialogued" (p. 381), but all other available detailed descriptions (including his own from 1997) mention a dialogue sequence. Note also that Crisp gives October 31 as the debut date of Les Trois masques and Cine-studies gives its release ("sortie") date as November 2. Note finally, where Crisp defines in Genre, Myth, and Convention a "feature" as being a minimum of sixty minutes long, this article follows the equally common, and Wikipedia-prevalent, standard of forty minutes or longer. Before the Paris studios were fully sound-equipped—a process that stretched well into 1930—a number of other early French talkies were shot in Germany.Crisp (1997), p. 103. The first all-talking German feature, Atlantik, had premiered in Berlin on October 28. Yet another Elstree-made movie, it was rather less German at heart than Les Trois masques and La Route est belle were French; a BIP production with a British scenarist and German director, it was also shot in English as Atlantic.Chapman (2003), p. 82; Chronomedia: 1929 chronology of media developments during the year—part of the Terra Media website. The entirely German Aafa-Film production Dich hab ich geliebt (Because I Loved You) opened three-and-a-half weeks later. It was not "Germany's First Talking Film", as the marketing had it, but it was the first to be released in the United States.See the January 25, 1930, New York Times review for a description. put it, "in the unforgettable images of this spare and pure story we can discern the effort of an entire nation."Carné (1932), p. 105.In 1930, the first Polish talkies premiered, using sound-on-disc systems: Moralność pani Dulskiej (The Morality of Mrs. Dulska) in March and the all-talking Niebezpieczny romans (Dangerous Love Affair) in October.Haltof (2002), p. 24. In Italy, whose once vibrant film industry had become moribund by the late 1920s, the first talkie, La Canzone dell'amore (The Song of Love), also came out in October; within two years, Italian cinema would be enjoying a revival.See Nichols and Bazzoni (1995), p. 98, for a description of La Canzone dell'amore and its premiere. The first movie spoken in Czech debuted in 1930 as well, Tonka Sibenice (Gallows Toni).According to Il Cinema Ritrovato, the program for XXI Mostra Internazionale del Cinema Libero (Bologna; November 22–29, 1992), the film was shot in Paris. According to the IMDb entry on the film, it was a Czech-German coproduction. The two claims are not necessarily contradictory. Several European nations with minor positions in the field also produced their first talking pictures—Belgium (in French), Denmark, Greece, and Romania.. See Robertson (2001), pp. 10–14. Robertson claims Switzerland produced its first talkie in 1930, but it has not been possible to independently confirm this. The first talkies from Finland, Hungary, Norway, Portugal, and Turkey appeared in 1931, the first talkies from Ireland (English-language) and Spain and the first in Slovak in 1932, the first Dutch talkie in 1933, and the first Bulgarian talkie in 1934. In the Americas, the first Canadian talkie came out in 1929—North of '49 was a remake of the previous year's silent His Destiny. The first Brazilian talkie, Acabaram-se os otários (The End of the Simpletons), also appeared in 1929. That year, as well, the first Yiddish talkies were produced in New York: East Side Sadie (originally a silent), followed by Ad Mosay (The Eternal Prayer) (Crafton , p. 414). Sources differ on whether Más fuerte que el deber, the first Mexican (and Spanish-language) talkie, came out in 1930 or 1931. The first Argentine talkie appeared in 1931 and the first Chilean talkie in 1934. Robertson asserts that the first Cuban feature talkie was a 1930 production called El Caballero de Max; every other published source surveyed cites La Serpiente roja (1937). Nineteen-thirty-one saw the first talkie produced on the African continent: South Africa's Mocdetjie, in Afrikaans. Egypt's Arabic Onchoudet el Fouad (1932) and Morocco's French-language Itto (1934) followed. The Soviet Union's robust film industry came out with its first sound features in 1931: Dziga Vertov's nonfiction Entuziazm, with an experimental, dialogueless soundtrack, was released in the spring.Several sources name Zemlya zhazhdet (The Earth Is Thirsty), directed by Yuli Raizman, as the first Soviet sound feature. Originally produced and premiered as a silent in 1930, it was rereleased with a non-talking, music-and-effects soundtrack the following year. In the fall, the Nikolai Ekk drama Putyovka v zhizn (The Road to Life), premiered as the state's first talking picture.

    Throughout much of Europe, conversion of exhibition venues lagged well behind production capacity, requiring talkies to be produced in parallel silent versions or simply shown without sound in many places. While the pace of conversion was relatively swift in Britain—with over 60 percent of theaters equipped for sound by the end of 1930, similar to the U.S. figure—in France, by contrast, more than half of theaters nationwide were still projecting in silence by late 1932.Crisp (1997), p. 101; Crafton (1997), p. 155. According to scholar Colin G. Crisp, "Anxiety about resuscitating the flow of silent films was frequently expressed in the industrial press, and a large section of the industry still saw the silent as a viable artistic and commercial prospect till about 1935."Crisp (1997), p. 101–102. The situation was particularly acute in the Soviet Union; as of spring 1933, fewer than one out of every hundred film projectors in the country was as yet equipped for sound.Kenez (2001), p. 123.

    The transition: Asia 's Madamu to nyobo (The Neighbor's Wife and Mine; 1931), a production of the Shochiku studio, was the first major commercial and critical success of Japanese sound cinema.During the 1920s and 1930s, Japan was one of the world's two largest producers of motion pictures, along with the United States. Though the country's film industry was among the first to produce both sound and talking features, the full changeover to sound proceeded much more slowly than in the West. It appears that the first Japanese sound film, Reimai (Dawn), was made in 1926 with the De Forest Phonofilm system.Burch (1979), pp. 145–146. Note that Burch misdates Madamu to nyobo as 1932. He also incorrectly claims that Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse made no sound films before 1936. In fact, Ozu's Hakoiri musume (An Innocent Maid, aka The Young Virgin) and Naruse's Tsuma yo bara no yo ni (Wife! Be Like a Rose!), both acclaimed talking features, were produced and released in 1935. Using the sound-on-disc Minatoki system, the leading Nikkatsu studio produced a pair of talkies in 1929: Taii no musume (The Captain's Daughter) and Furusato (Hometown), the latter directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. The rival Shochiku studio began the successful production of sound-on-film talkies in 1931 using a variable-density process called Tsuchibashi.Anderson and Richie (1982), p. 77. Two years later, however, more than 80 percent of movies made in the country were still silents. Two of the country's leading directors, Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse, did not make their first sound films until 1935. As late as 1938, over a third of all movies produced in Japan were shot without dialogue.Freiberg (1987), p. 76.

    The enduring popularity of the silent medium in Japanese cinema owed in great part to the tradition of the benshi, a live narrator who performed as accompaniment to a film screening. As director Akira Kurosawa later described, the benshi "not only recounted the plot of the films, they enhanced the emotional content by performing the voices and sound effects and providing evocative descriptions of events and images on the screen.... The most popular narrators were stars in their own right, solely responsible for the patronage of a particular theatre."Quoted in Freiberg (1987), p. 76. Film historian Mariann Lewinsky argues,The end of silent film in the West and in Japan was imposed by the industry and the market, not by any inner need or natural evolution.... Silent cinema was a highly pleasurable and fully mature form. It didn't lack anything, least in Japan, where there was always the human voice doing the dialogues and the commentary. Sound films were not better, just more economical. As a cinema owner you didn't have to pay the wages of musicians and benshi any more. And a good benshi was a star demanding star payment. A Page of Madness (1927) interview with Mariann Lewinsky by Jasper Sharp, March 7, 2002; part of the Midnight Eye website.By the same token, the viability of the benshi system facilitated a gradual transition to sound—allowing the studios to spread out the capital costs of conversion and their directors and technical crews time to become familiar with the new technology.See Freiburg (2000), "The Film Industry." premiered March 14, 1931, in Bombay. The first Indian talkie was so popular that "police aid had to be summoned to control the crowds."Quoted in Chatterji (1999), "The History of Sound." It was shot with the Tanar single-system camera, which recorded sound directly onto the film.The Mandarin-language

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